..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Match Point

Directed by Woody Allen
Dreamworks

A very good yet extremely eccentric melodrama about social strivers and sexual hypocrisy, Woody Allen's Match Point (***) transposes the fixations that usually nest in his wealth-centric Manhattan to the upper-crust of London, with intriguing results. While there are fine affinities one might credit to predecessors like French director Claude Chabrol, novelist Patricia Highsmith and the name-checked F. Dostoevsky, Match Point fascinates mostly for its otherworldliness, where behavior and performance is less "bad" than entertainingly strange. The best movies by David Mamet are the ones that are entirely in a unique zone that you could call Mamet-land, movies such as Spartan or House of Games, which are almost lunar in their strangeness. One of the factors in Match Point's compulsive watchability may be Allen's reputed unwillingness to reconcile performances within a film-that is, he casts an actor or actress like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox or Penelope Wilton-and then allows them to do what they do naturally with an extensive supply of rope on hand. Thus, Rhys Meyers' striver, an Irish tennis pro who marries into money, is a cool creep, missing social signals like the King of All Asperger's; Emily Mortimer is flittery-fidgety-charming-insecure, from another world; American bounder Johansson is a husky-voiced lush and harridan in the making, but one that has the actress' customary fire. Like real people, behaviors clash with unexpected sparks; unlike real people, they speak in spurts of Allen's dour, gnomic thought. And then you realize: jeez, these banalities suit them and these performances are out of control within a supremely genteel production. This may not be Allen's intention, but the result is interesting stuff and the spirals of "explanation" toward the end make a pleasing coda. 124m.

- Ray Pride